Menu

Brains Eden Gaming Festival

21-11-2013

Together with four other classmates, we went to Cambridge to participate as a team at the Brains Eden Gaming Festival at the Anglia Ruskin University from 28 June to 1 July 2013. The festival is mainly about the creation, design and development of games. The day began with professionals in the game industry that came to give lectures and workshops to prepare for the big game that took place on 29 and 30 June. 31 teams from all over Europe from different courses where participating the challenge to create a game within 48 hours with the specific theme “mountains”. For the required hardware and software, we had to bring ourself. It was very competitive and the other teams were great. July 1 was the exhibition of the games and the awards ceremony with drinks, food and an exhibition of artwork submitted by other students. The big winners were offered an internship at Sony Guerilla.

BAFTA question time

Brains Eden is fully supported and funded by industry leaders such as ARM, Sony Guerrilla Cambridge, PlayStation First, Frontier and Jagex. The BAFTA Question Time Panel is the opportunity to quiz some of the biggest brains in games and get their opinions on the current trends and issues affecting the games industry. The panel includes David Walsh (Frontier Developments), Mark Gerhard (Jagex), Terry Cavanagh, Nizar Romdhane (ARM) and Mark Green (Guerrilla Cambridge). The inimitable Ian Livingstone takes on chairing duties.

Hunger for skills

Our team consists of Tinus Kardolus (designer), Thijs Vermunt (designer), Hisham Taha (audio),Joep Suijkerbuik (developer) and me (developer). We rather came together to discuss, divide tasks, software and hardware installation, testing and setting up a game framework before the big challenge. We chose to develop with actionscript 3.0 because this was a fairly well-known technique among us as developers and easier than develop in unity or html5. Because it was a short time so we had to choose the fastest way to create a game. This year’s theme was “mountains” and we were brainstorming immeadiately. Within an hour we had the concept. We (Joep and I) focusses on the game technically. The framework we worked with is Citrus Engine, an opensource fast and lightweighted game engine/framework with a core library of about 100kb. It contains libraries like Stage3d, Starling, Away3d, Box2d, NAPE, AwayPhysics for 2d and 3d physics.

Once upon a time

After ups, downs, sweating, many energy drinks, chips, pizza and sleepless nights we created the game “Crumble”. A cartoon-like 2d animated game where an angry mountain trying to split the big city. View work in my portfolio.

“Once upon a time there was a peacefull village. They lived in harmony. But one day an evil mountain decided to tear the village in two parts. Dark days fell upon the village. Until now. A hero arises to defeat the villainous mountain, even at the cost of his own live. Will he save and reunite the village? Play and see…”

As a player, you should make sure to stay alive and save lives. Play the game at http://crumblethegame.ezrabotter.com/ and try to save this city from the evil mountain. View the documentary made by Hisham (it is in Dutch language). We had a lot of fun but mainly learned a lot from each other, the experience, the presentations and all other teams and professionals.